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1 9 9 7 © Image Club	Seek Sustainability! By Alan Briskin The emergent issue of the 21st century for organizations will be the sustainability of their human capital -- mind, body, and spirit. As organizations continue to excel in innovation, productivity, and efficiency, they must not ignore the human price for these achievements. A current riddle in corporate hallways goes like this: How do you know when a donkey is carrying maximum load? You keep adding a brick at a time until the donkey's legs buckle. Then you remove one brick. The hoped-for efficiencies of reengineered systems have not yet demonstrated that people can do more with less. Alan Briskin Instead, people often feel like the donkey in the riddle -- waiting for someone to realize that their legs are buckling. The recent downsizing and reengineering phase of corporate renewal bears similarity to the futurist visions of post-World War II optimists who saw a new world of technology and automated factories freeing people for leisure activities. They didn't see -- and neither have we recently -- that technology combined with global market forces can also be used to harness human labor for more work as well as to free it from drudgery. Sustainability is a framework for understanding a whole constellation of trends because it speaks to human, organizational, and ecological concerns. Within the framework of sustainable thinking, we can better talk with each other about both the hopeful and disturbing signs related to the long-term health of people and organizations. A recent American Medical Association study suggests that 70% of the complaints heard by primary care professionals are stress or stress-associated disorders: depression, muscular-skeletal problems, headaches, insomnia, intestinal problems, protracted colds, and other symptoms of breakdowns in human immune systems. The workplace is often considered a major source generating these symptoms. A study of workplace climate in California noted that nearly half of workers surveyed report serious concern about basic issues such as medical benefits, continued employment, and opportunities for advancement. One in four workers report being somewhat or often angry most of the time. At a time when work is increasingly accomplished in teams and networks, negative emotions like anger and hostility are toxic to effective work relations and outcomes. "Dilbert," not Deming or Peters or Hammer, has become the true benchmark for people's experience of work. Yet workers in the majority of cases still say they like their work and believe it has a positive effect on their health. The question is whether this perception, and its paradoxical reality, can be sustained. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually, disturbing trends are emerging that require us to reconsider the source of and remedies for stress. We used to be concerned about stress with regard to the Type A personality -- and even the Type H (hostile personality). New theories, however, point to "high responders," people who respond to their environment (work, and life beyond work) with high levels of fear, anxiety, depression, and hopelessness. As organizations demand more from workers, testing their physical stamina and increasing claims to their emotional engagement, opportunities for them to control their work environment and reach out for social support are also being stripped away. Thus, the tendency to produce "high responders" increases while the capacity to respond in healthy ways becomes less likely. Some of the tactics we will see to combat this are new psychological/emotional techniques and training to aid individuals to cope in healthier ways. But will these new techniques be enough? Sustainability as an underlying premise to organizational health and performance is all the more urgent as the distance between economic capacity and human capacity is shrinking. In the past, we could act from an implicit belief that society must first attend to productivity concerns, and individuals would learn to cope as best they could. But as Fortune's Thomas Stewart points out in his book, Intellectual Capital, the current and future era of capitalism is different. Increasingly jobs require human characteristics involving judging, sensing, creative thinking, and building relationships. These are elements of emotional intelligence that necessitate reflection, behavior born of knowing one's values, and the most human characteristic of all -- the ability to construct meaning. The sustainability of an organization's economic capacity -- its ability to foster intellectual capital -- is intricately linked with its ability to sustain its human values, the ability for people to lead richer and more meaningful lives.   This MANAGEMENT GENERAL "Ezzay" © 1997 by Alan Briskin Access other ezzay thinkers: click "LEADERS" below.
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.	. Alan Briskin, Ph.D., is a management consultant and author of The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace (Jossey-Bass, 1996). He works with corporate, nonprofit, and public service organizations in the areas of role analysis and systems thinking. He has experience in a broad array of industries, including accounting, banking, education, health care, high technology, law, manufacturing, media, penology, religion, and software. He is also a professional associate of The Grubb Institute, an international research and training institute based in London, England. E-mail Alan Briskin  |  About MG, This Newsletter © 1997 - by - MANAGEMENT GENERAL